Did you catch this story? The eighteen year old son of a wealthy Berkshire landowner apparently climbed up on the roof of the family home and painted an enormous phallus there - an estimated sixty feet long. The son is currently travelling abroad. His parents say he will have to scrub it off when he gets home. That chimney had better watch out! It's thought the offending item has been up there for over a year and may have remained unnoticed if it wasn't for a passing light aircraft. The pilot probably thought it was a signpost to business celebrity Alan Sugar's mansion!Don't you agree that acts of relatively harmless mischief are part and parcel of wholesome living? My Irish builder friend Joe has a dirty white van and I have been known to write mischievous things in the grime with my index finger - "Ireland RUFC Team Bus", "Joe's Love Wagon", "Donegal Or Bust", "Union of White Van Men" etc..
At Mediterranean hotels, you will find ignorant and selfish guests claiming sunloungers with towels long before they arrive to lie on them. Once in Minorca, I noticed how some guests laid their towels out around midnight ready for the next morning! Unbelievable! Departing Minorca, we had a flight to catch at around six in the morning so we were being picked up from the hotel around three a.m.. I crept around the sunloungers collecting every damned towel. Then I took them to the kids' pool table round the corner of our block and very neatly I piled these towels up one on top of the other in no particular order. There were at least thirty of them. Shame I never got to see the guests' faces when they sauntered smugly to their "reserved" sunloungers later that day or angrily sorted their towels out from the pile.
"Who would do something like this Brian?"
"Probably that Yorkshire nutter in Apartment 32. The one who was always reading!"
The phallus boy almost inspires me to dream up a new and much bigger act of mischief of my own. Something new. Something original. Something that would make folk giggle. Any ideas?
Oh yes, I like this, it made me giggle too.
ReplyDeleteLike the person who famously defaced the street name at the heart of Manchester's Gay Village - Canal Street, they painted over the 'C' and the 'S', that wanton act of graffiti became part of the rich culture of the area.
I love Banksy - his is the art of people like us YP!
That roof obviously contains an artist's depiction of the last flight of the dirigible Hindenburg moments before its untimely end in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
ReplyDeleteI think that boy's parents should be proud - okay, he's perhaps not the first to draw a phallus in this way - - but he had an original take on an old theme! I think they should leave it and try to get it adopted by the Tourist Board.
ReplyDeleteHow about a huge man on the side of a hill with a massive erection. That would be a first eh?
ReplyDeleteYup, saw this and chuckled and then looked more closely at the image - the "banner" and the roof shape don't seem to match and I think it may be a photoshop job - in which case, what a shame - as a real piece of minor teenage anarchy it's brill!
ReplyDeleteYP: I applaud your mischief with the towels. It's the sort of thing I would do. As far as ideas go, you could perhaps do something creative with a lawnmower.
ReplyDeleteCROFTY An fine upstanding member of the Oldham community like you championing graffiti! As Victor Meldrew might say "I can't believe it!"
ReplyDeleteRHYMES WITH P Lay off the late night bourbons Mr Brague - your imagination is running wild.
DAPHNE Good idea I will forward to the Hungerford Tourist Board. They have been having trouble attracting visitors since the shooting rampage a few years back.
STEVE I know it's wrong to brag but I modelled for the giant at Cerne Abbas back in the seventies.
MOPSA Doubter! That phallus painting is 100% for real as other aerial photographs demonstrate. The lad was hoping to see it within Google Earth.
FARIDA DOWLER Something creative with a lawnmower? I've got it! Crop circles! Now that's never been done before has it?
How abot spray painting Cruella's hearsemobile?
ReplyDeleteOne word should do it 'Inadequate'
A little bit of mischief now and then never hurt anyone. I remember when I were a lad living in Headingley (Leeds 6) I looked forward to the night before Bonfire Night - Mischievous Night where we'd go round the neighbourhood perpetrating silly pranks. Does that still exist or has it been outlawed by the nanny state like so many other things?
ReplyDeletePS I like the towel trick!
are you sure that's not Jacqui Smith's constitency house in the picture YP? I hear she's a fan of that kind of thing
ReplyDelete